Prediction of College Performance and Personality Based on Association Rating of All Possible Sets of Terms in a Course of Instruction. Final Report.

Hildum, Donald C.

This study tested whether the word association employed by individual students could be used to predict their performance in a particular course. It was designed to explore a new method for describing the various models used in thinking and to determine whether this approach would yield results that were consonant with current cognitive theory. At the beginning and end of an introductory course in Social Psychology, college freshmen and their instructor filled out association matrices for 20 words that were central to the course. Using 1 word as a subject, the students assigned associability scale values to all possible pairs of words on a 7-point scale, indicating to what degree each of the other words would "fit in" with (top of scale) or change (bottom of scale) the subject. At the end of the term the association matrices were analyzed by a new, non-parametric method of factor analysis, the Matrix Optimizing System (Mopsy). Two major hypotheses of the study were confirmed with levels of correlations in the .3 to .4 range: students whose associative matrices yield a larger number of dimensions under the non-parametric factor analysis tend to get higher grades, and those whose cognitive dimensions match those of the instructor also tend to get higher grades. The Mopsy, which is discussed in detail, is suggested as a probably alternative to standard parametric methods of factor analysis. (WM)